


reunion theory

by deadlybride



Series: fic for fire relief [1]
Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Body Horror, Body Modification, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Post-Nibelheim Incident (Compilation of FFVII), Rape/Non-con Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:54:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26501707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadlybride/pseuds/deadlybride
Summary: Cloud was never meant to be a SOLDIER. His body wasn't built for it. His body is built for other things.
Relationships: Hojo/Cloud Strife, Sephiroth/Cloud Strife
Series: fic for fire relief [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1926739
Comments: 8
Kudos: 123





	reunion theory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [doilycoffin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/doilycoffin/gifts).



> This fic was written for wildfire relief. Personalized fics are available on request; see [this post on my tumblr](https://zmediaoutlet.tumblr.com/post/629171809812643840/fic-for-fire-relief) for more info.

It’s a daze, at first. For—how long? Weeks? Months. Cloud bleeds in the murky light of the reactor, looks at the dark purple wet blooming up through his blue uniform. His hand comes away—some color he doesn’t know. The lights in here are red, blue. He holds his hand back against his stomach and thinks about how long Sephiroth’s sword is. Seven feet and two inches, the longest sword ever wielded by a man. Cloud knows because Zack told him, showing off a little. Their general, the superhero. Cloud doesn’t think Zack ever thought about what seven feet and two inches would feel like, going straight through him. Through them both.

It’s hard to think. The sirens keep going off and there’s a smashing sound, somewhere, deeper in the reactor. He tries to breathe. He wants to go home, and remembers only after he tries to turn over to try to crawl that the town is burning, and that his mother is dead.

*

Darkness. Drifting. He dreams of basic training and always falling behind the other recruits, always the shortest, the slowest, the weakest. Somewhere up ahead he sees a tall boy with messy black hair, and a taller man with his hair this long sweep of beautiful, unnatural silver, and he reaches out but there’s his sergeant, smacking him on the chest with the flat of his sword, saying _Strife, back in line_ , and he has to go back to drills, again. They never end.

*

He wakes up and he’s—cold. It’s cold. Cold enough he should be shivering but he doesn’t seem to. It’s very bright, when his eyes open. Blinding electric, the light smearing in front of his watering eyes. He hurts, all over. His stomach.

“Interesting.”

He doesn’t know what could be. He wants—a blanket. His cot in the barracks.

“You didn’t administer a sedative, did you?”

“No, Dr. Hojo.”

“Hm. Very interesting. He isn’t making noise.”

Should he be? He tries to lift his hand and it doesn’t seem to cooperate, but then he thinks, he can’t really feel his hand. He blinks and feels the wet trails that streak down his temples, and his stomach, and not much else.

“He’s paralyzed. See? The spinal cord, severed—there, by the initial cut by the general, but here too, by the fall down into reactor floor. I thought he’d be…”

“Doctor?”

A pause. Cloud wonders what he would’ve been. His spine, he thinks, and thinks then that he won’t be able to complete drills. He’s going to be discharged, from the army, and then what will everyone at home say? There goes Cloud, fucking it up again. And—his mom—

“Repair the spinal column. This is an interesting specimen. We’ll pause the organ experiments, for the moment. I want to see how this plays out.”

Cloud closes his eyes again. The light hurts them, and even if everything’s just washed to red behind his eyelids, that’s better than the dizzying oppression of white. He doesn’t know how to play the organ. Tifa does.

*

There’s a tank, they keep him in. He floats, drifts. Dreams and doesn’t dream. In the tank beside him is Zack, alive. Furious. Trying to make jokes, with mime because of course they can’t hear each other through the suspension fluid. The jokes are bad. That’s how he’s sure it’s Zack.

He doesn’t know what this fluid is doing but it hurts. It hurts all the time, now. There’s a tube that attaches to his face to make sure he can breathe, and there’s a tube that goes into his arm that constantly flows with sluggish red-black fluid, and there’s another tube that attaches to this big patch, on his stomach. It’s a solid silver, can’t see what if anything goes in or out, but his stomach hurts all the time, and worse even than his skin, or his head, or his chest. It’s a relief when he sleeps but anymore, most of the time, he dreams about the tank, so what difference does it make.

Zack’s pounding on the side of his tank. It’s loud enough that Cloud can hear it, through the suspension fluid and through the double-wall of glass surrounding them both, and he thinks, fondly, that Zack’s always been a real pain in the ass. He sees the glass splinter, on Zack’s tank. It fractures, spreading.

The top of Cloud’s tank opens and he’s drawn out by the mechanical arm. “Dose him with the sedative,” Dr. Hojo says. Dismissive tone—he means Zack. “Repair the tank while he’s out. I told you to spring for the quadruple pane.”

Solution rinsed off his bare skin. Somehow the water stings as much as the solution did. “And how are we responding to the mako treatments?” Hojo says, but Cloud’s not supposed to answer. Two men pick him up, bring him to the table. It’s bare and silver and cold, and he likes it much better than his tank. It’s nice to feel something solid underneath himself. They strap his wrists down, spread his legs and latch them into the stirrups, and he relaxes, his eyes half-lidded. When they take the tube out of his throat he coughs, but only once, and Hojo smiles at him, leaning over, looking at his face. “Good boy.”

He does much better with Hojo than he ever did with his sergeant. There’s more hammering, somewhere, and Hojo speaks slightly over his shoulder and doesn’t take his eyes away from Cloud. “Triple the dose of sedative. I don’t want the SOLDIER interrupting.”

He touches Cloud’s chest, his chin. Turns his face back and forth, under the lights, and hums, like he’s thinking. “You are remarkable, young man,” he says, vaguely absent. “I’ve told and told Scarlet. She’s always picking the most robust subjects for the mako infusion. Her weakness for height and muscles blinds her. It’s not muscles that maketh man, is it?”

Cloud’s not expected to answer, not that he can. He mouths something, anyway, and Hojo’s eyes snap to his face, and he gets a thinly amused smile. “My little boy,” Hojo says, and touches Cloud’s cheek. “The army didn’t know what they were wasting, did they?”

Cloud blinks, his lips parting. Hojo touches them, his always-gloved fingers slick and alien, and then he drags his hand back down to the big patch, over Cloud’s stomach. “I’ve had an idea,” he says. It’s warm, somehow. Like he’s inviting Cloud into a secret. “If you live, it will be an incredible advancement to scientific understanding. We’ll see how it goes, won’t we?”

There are needles, then. Injections. Hojo stays where he is, watching Cloud’s face, and the other men move around him. His throat and his chest and his thighs and—inside—and he doesn’t make a noise because he doesn’t, and Hojo smiles at him, hand low on his stomach, under where the silver patch ends. “Perfect,” he says, pleased, and Cloud feels his mouth twitch, vaguely glad that he’s getting this right, and then the long tube comes back, filling his mouth and then his throat and then pumping the oxygen in, and that makes him dizzy again, and his eyes drift closed, and when he opens them again he’s—in the tank, in the mako. Zack’s sleeping, curled up in the other tank. He feels—he doesn’t know how he feels. He drifts.

*

He dreams. Sephiroth. They’re in the basement of the mansion, in Nibelheim, and Cloud stands at the end of the library’s long hall. He’s still. He thinks this happened, before. That he stood here, and he waited for Sephiroth because Sephiroth was his commander, and that Sephiroth ignored him, reading. Furious and then implacable.

In the dream Sephiroth isn’t ignoring him. He stands at the other end of the hall, in the dim candlelight. He’s looking Cloud in the eyes. He says nothing, which is fine because Cloud is silent, too, and when he holds out his hand, Cloud jerks, trying to move closer on instinct. He can’t move. Suspended, like he’s trapped by some invisible force, even though he wants—he wants very badly—to close the distance between them. To take Sephiroth’s hand. Sephiroth smiles at him, for trying. His eyes drop to Cloud’s stomach.

*

The tank. Zack’s watching him, worried. He can’t break the glass anymore and mostly doesn’t try. He presses his hands to the glass and finger-spells Cloud’s name, against the inside, and Cloud watches him do it and doesn’t respond. He feels—he doesn’t know. He feels not like himself.

The lid, the mechanical arm. The washing, impersonal. The air’s so cold. They lay him on his table and he melts into it, his limbs like lead. They don’t bother to strap him down because they hardly need to, after so long, but they spread his legs into the stirrups, and Hojo stands between them. He smiles. “You’ve done so well,” he says, and takes the tube out of Cloud’s throat with his own hands. Cloud doesn’t cough, this time. The tube is handed to one of the assistants and disappears. Hojo touches his arms, squeezes the insides of his elbows, just above where the IVs go inside. “Your friend rejected the cells immediately. What a waste. I should tell Scarlet—one of her handpicked SOLDIER boys, reduced to a control group, while the grunt becomes—” He shakes his head. He looks proud. Cloud’s fingers curl, helpless, hanging in the air by the sides of the table. “You’re perfect. If I’d known, we wouldn’t have wasted all that time and effort on those worthless clones. You’re Specimen #1—did you know that?” Rhetorical, and he tracks his hands up Cloud’s arms, to his shoulders, to his chest. Squeezes there, thoughtful for a moment, and shakes his head. He speaks to the side, where an assistant takes notes. “Strike the mammary experiment. No point in clouding our variables.”

Clouding. Cloud feels his mouth twitch. Hojo notices and smiles at him, again, and drags his hands down to the silver patch on his stomach. “Can’t believe you fell into my lap,” he says, quiet murmur, like it’s something soft between them. Cloud thinks of Zack, leaning into his ear by their campfire. Secrets that made Cloud’s face hot to hear them. Hojo’s hands drag further down, and touch Cloud’s penis, and his testicles, and then below, and there’s—Cloud doesn’t move or make a noise, because he doesn’t, but there’s something—

“Has it healed?” Hojo says, and an assistant says, “Yes, doctor.” Pressure, then—a single point—and then—

Cloud’s lips part, air leaving him. It feels dry, plasticky. Hojo’s eyes are between his legs. “Fully functional, is it?” he says, and a voice says, again, _yes, doctor,_ and Hojo says with a laced edge of venom, “It’s meant to have mucus membranes, idiot. It has a purpose, it’s not just a tunnel.”

Fumbled apologies, panic in them. Hojo shakes his head and holds out his other hand. When his fingers return they’re slick, and Cloud feels them push inside, wet this time. Cool, with the plastic of the gloves, but easy. It doesn’t hurt. Hojo looks between his legs, pumping his fingers in and out, and then frowns, and looks at Cloud’s face. “I wonder,” he says. A wet noise. Two fingers into Cloud’s asshole, and the other hand holds his testicles, rubs them. Cold from the gloves but warming, with body contact, and the fingers inside curl and press, a slow but firm massage. Cloud blinks, breathes. Something stirs, in his belly. Below it. His penis doesn’t feel it but there’s—somewhere else—

“Hm.” Hojo presses hard, inside, and rubs a plastic-covered thumb under his testicles, and there’s a—clench, and Cloud feels very distinctly a spill of wet, a gush, somewhere that he doesn’t—that’s not—

“Fascinating,” Hojo says, quietly. More loudly: “Very well, you’re not fired. But reconnect the nerve endings,” he says, and withdraws his hands, and touches Cloud’s pelvis—“Here, and here. No sense in beating around the bush.”

Cloud feels hot, from his face to his chest to between his legs. Hojo removes his gloves, the plastic snapping loud in the quiet, and for the first time Cloud sees his skin. Smooth-looking, he thinks. Palest gold. Neat nails, and a scar, across the knuckles on the right hand. Like from a fight.

“We’ll make sure everything fits right, my dear,” Hojo says, and he leans forward, studying Cloud’s face like he so often does. “Specimen #1 deserves the best. You’ve done so well for me. You can be proud.”

Cloud smiles. His lips feel like they crack a little, at the corners. Hojo’s mouth parts, so slightly, and he looks all over Cloud’s face. Into his eyes. Touches, finally, his face, and his bare skin is—oh, warm, and Cloud turns his head, trying to get closer. Hojo allows it, for a second. Cups his cheek, in his palm. His thumb, dragging up under Cloud’s lip.

When he’s put back into the tank he relaxes, his limbs light in the mako-heavy water. He turns his head and Zack’s watching him, pressed up against his own tank-wall, his face—distressed, for some reason. Cloud smiles at him, not that Zack can tell with the mask over Cloud’s face, the tube stretching his throat. He curls his fingers, instead, a little wave. They took the silver patch off his stomach, before they put him back, and he feels—good. Okay. The pain of the mako doesn’t even bother him, anymore. He doesn’t know why Zack looks like he’s about to cry.

*

He dreams. The mansion. The basement. The long hall, lined with books, and he stands at one end and Sephiroth stands at the other. He’s looking at Cloud, intent, and Cloud looks back. Sephiroth is—always has been—beautiful. Tall, strong. That fall of the silver hair, down his back and over his shoulders, and the slanted tilt of his perfect eyes. SOLDIERs’ eyes hold a flicker of mako-green, betraying the infusion. Sephiroth’s are that color from edge to edge.

Cloud stands, and can’t move. He holds out a hand and Sephiroth smiles at him, sweet, and in an instant he’s in front of Cloud, and in the next instant he’s holding Cloud’s face in his hands, stroking his thumbs over Cloud’s cheeks. He bends his head, down, down—Cloud tips his face up—and Sephiroth’s forehead touches his, their noses brushing. Sephiroth’s hands drag down his throat, down his chest, to his stomach. Dig in there, his fingertips spreading wide over the flat where Cloud’s long since healed, and his lips brush Cloud’s, then, and he says, so quiet that Cloud doesn’t even hear it— _Cloud_.

His name, in Sephiroth’s mouth. Something he thought he’d never hear. He sways, asking—his hands helpless, at his sides—and he’s borne to his back, on the library floor, books shoved out of their way, papers flying. Sephiroth’s hair hangs around them, silver curtain, and he presses his fingers into Cloud’s mouth and then drags them wet down his belly, and then pushes—inside—that place where Cloud’s soft, now, and open, and so wet, all the time, his body dripping, ready. Another smile, warm like they’ve got a secret between them—and Cloud’s thighs spread, wide, Sephiroth’s hands pressing them open, his knees rising, and when it pushes into him it’s—Cloud gasps—cold almost, so hard it’s unyielding, a thick weight that digs in, slicks up deep. It warms quickly, to his body, and he reaches his hands up, curling them around Sephiroth’s shoulders. He gets a considering look, and then there’s—a jolt—inside, and the thickness pumps inside him, and he arches his back and it feels—god—good, it feels good, working inside, steady rhythm, mechanical, pushing in and in and in to loosen up this new passage, to press him open, to batter him into a new shape. He keeps his eyes open, watches Sephiroth’s face. The sharp feline angles of it; the surprising softness, of his mouth, when so often it’s been cruel, or indifferent, or smirking. He doesn’t smirk, now. He watches Cloud right back, and brushes his knuckles over Cloud’s cheek, and inside Cloud feels heat pooling, his insides rearranging. Welcoming, wanting. He wishes he could close his thighs around Sephiroth’s waist—wants to wrap his arms around his back, draw him in closer—wants to bury him inside, where he’ll never leave—but he can’t move, like that. He drags in air, flexes his fingers. His thighs clench and inside there’s this wonderful coiling—something. He’s so wet and he’s so, so ready—wants Sephiroth inside him, deeper—where it actually counts—and when it happens it’s like he’s pierced, somewhere, and his hips flatten out and he lifts up entirely, his shoulders and back coming off the ground—off the table—his head tipping back—his core, spasming—and Sephiroth says, soft in his ear, “Cloud,” and then there’s—

*

In Midgar, Cloud holds himself apart. He’s polite to Tifa, from their shared past, but he’s been through too much he doesn’t want to share with her. A SOLDIER’s life is a little different, he thinks, to a bar waitress’s. He’s accepted a job, he thinks. Nothing more. If she wants to talk about old times… Well. He’s going to get paid, first. He’s not reliving how Nibelheim burned—how he fought Sephiroth—how he recovered, alone—unless he’s sure his purse is fat enough to keep him in food and shelter for a month, at least.

Tifa looks at him strangely, sometimes. She doesn’t ask too many questions. Just as well. Barret’s an asshole, but at least he’s a predictable asshole. Doesn’t trust Cloud, and that’s fine; Cloud doesn’t trust any of them, either.

Midgar’s—not familiar. Not down here, in the slums. Cloud has a room, in Sector VII, that Tifa got him, and after a day of mercenary work it’s serviceable. He closes himself inside, past midnight, and slings the buster sword off his shoulder, and stands alone in the mostly-dark, the only lights filtering in through the torn-up blinds from the plate, high above. He rubs his shoulder, under his pauldron, wondering what tomorrow will bring.

A hand closes over his bare shoulder. He goes still.

Leather glove, not plastic. He doesn’t know why he makes that distinction. Another hand, another glove, reaching around, dragging a thumb over his jaw. “Hello, Cloud,” he hears, and he can’t close his eyes because he can’t—move. “Long time.”

The hand slides down his throat, his chest. His uniform drags, under the weight of it. A pause, and then it spreads, on his belly. Wide, big, because Cloud’s always been—small. Smaller. The fingertips bite in, the weight of it heavy. Possessive.

A head ducks in, a mouth brushes his ear. Silver hair swings over his shoulder. “This is mine,” Sephiroth says. He presses his hand harder, where the lowest curve of Cloud’s stomach presses out, just barely, just a tiny bit. “He didn’t know what he was doing, did he? When he made you. A gift, just for me.” The hand on his shoulder comes over to his jaw and bites in, achingly hard, turning his face so that his mouth brushes Sephiroth’s, hovering as close as it is. He breathes, shaky. The hand on his stomach goes soft, cupping. Tender, almost, as the tone of his voice. “I’m coming to collect, Cloud. I expect you to be waiting.”

Gone, in the next second. Like he was never there. Cloud stands alone in the tiny apartment, holding his stomach with both hands. He looks sightlessly at the opposite wall and cups the tiny curve. His jaw throbs. It’s going to bruise.

**Author's Note:**

> [posted here on my tumblr if you'd like to reblog](https://zmediaoutlet.tumblr.com/post/629199746293170176/in-support-of-wildfire-relief-doilycoffin) \-- reblogs help more people see the relief campaign, so it's appreciated if you have a tumblr.
> 
> Would appreciate any thoughts you have.


End file.
